Surface plasmon resonance phenomenon measuring equipment is an apparatus which enables the monitoring of food safety or environment or the high-sensitivity detection of dangerous articles or drugs. This equipment is expected to find applications in a number of fields such as environmental protection, medical care, agriculture, stock raising, food industry and the like.
Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measuring equipment has been marketed by BIACORE AB, NIPPON LASER & ELECTRONICS LAB, etc. With these equipment, the number of samples measured at one time is one, making low the efficiency of measurement.
In order to make small the SPR measuring equipment to enable on-site measurement, the present inventors developed portable SPR sensors (Japanese Patent No. 3462179, No. 3335621 and No. 3356212) wherein a light radiated from a light source is passed through a cylindrical lens to form a liner focus, the light of linear focus is allowed to be incident on a sensor made of a prism and a glass substrate, and the reflected light from the prism is measured by a CCD linear sensor. Even with these measuring equipment, the number of samples measured at one time is one as well, making low the efficiency of measurement.
In order to increase the efficiency of measurement, there is required a function enabling simultaneous analysis of a large number of samples, i.e. a function of simultaneous measurement of multi-sample or multi-channeling.
There are two proposals for realizing the multi-channeling. The first proposal is an approach in which a light from a light source is divided into two light paths by a beam splitter, they are allowed to hit the pre-determined two points of a SPR sensor constituted by a prism, the attenuated lights caused by surface plasma resonance phenomenon are detected by two independent light detectors, then the detection signals are each amplified (Japanese Patent No. 3462179). The second proposal is an approach in which a reflected light from a prism is divided into two light paths by a light-splitting mirror and they are detected by respective light detectors (Japanese Patent Application No. 2003-118565).
With the multi-channeling by these approaches, however, the division into light paths is one-dimensional (linear) and the number of samples measured at one time is limited to about two. Therefore, a striking increase in the efficiency of measurement is impossible.
Hence, it is desired to develop surface plasmon resonance phenomenon measuring equipment which has a function of efficiently analyzing a large number of samples (e.g. four or more samples) at one time, i.e. a function of simultaneous measurement of multi-sample or multi-channeling.